… courtesy of the players – or their teammates – themselves.

But don’t get too excited. It’s rather speculative at this point.

***************

If you’re interested in comparing this particular move from school to school, here’s last year’s best-known play:

Five football players from California University of Pennsylvania, who reportedly chanted “Football strong” as they left after brutally beating a 30-year-old man outside a popular off-campus restaurant, were arrested Thursday.

Numbers are a little shaky – UD seems to recall the U Cal number rose to eight suspended players, whereas so far the Rutgers team seems to have had five members – and of course it’s not fair to compare when one team has a numerical advantage.

But let’s say both teams had five members. The U Cal team did practically kill a guy, whereas it looks as though Rutgers was only able to break a guy’s jaw. Nor do I think Rutgers did a team shout-out of Football Strong or something like Football Strong.

But then again I don’t think the U Cal group filmed their play, while maybe we should give points to Rutgers if their guys did that.

For more of the financial and reputational benefits football has brought Rutgers, go here.

As for the players, as one explains, “We’re really a tight team. You’re going to defend your brothers. I’m going to do anything for those guys I’m out there playing with.” Which sounds wonderful until you see it play out in a bar when one of them gets in a fight and the others rush in to play defense. Or when some on-campus criminal mastermind organizes them into an armed home invasion team. They’re a violent lot, the Rutgers football guys, and very group-oriented. There’s no I in RUTGERS FOOTBALL.

Coach Flood will do anything for the guys. He even sets up little teas with faculty members to swap ideas on how best to educate them.

[One] get-together lasted about 50 minutes … and resulted in [a] part-time prof agreeing to assign [one player] extra work that could improve his grade because she felt “implicitly intimidated” and “uncomfortable,” given Flood’s status.

Flood gets along just as well with full-time faculty.

[A faculty rep] believes Flood’s decision to lean on a part-time professor who earns around $4,800 per class and enjoys little job protection wasn’t an accident. “A tenured professor like me would have told him go to hell.”

Yes, go to hell highest paid public employee in New Jersey! (And don’t forget those bonuses for, uh, successful get-togethers with professors!) Go to hell most powerful man on campus who with one word can rouse hordes of fans to ruin my life! Tenured Rutgers Faculty to Flood: Go To Hell!

Ah but they’re weary now, weary… (Headline: RUTGERS COMMUNITY WEARY…)

They need to bring back Ray Rice, pride of Rutgers, to slap a little sense into them…

… Stats!

Talk about a receiver who gives as well as he gets! Bravo, Rutgers. Your money is well-spent.

Schiano and his football program have pretty much cost Rutgers its intellectual reputation. Now that he’s gone, Rutgers will have to strain even more to pay for its pathetic fixation on games.

***************
UD thanks Dave.

The long day’s journey into court that is Rutgers – a bastion of filth and corruption (read the sports posts I just linked to) even by Jersey standards – moves appreciably closer to an actual court date. To revisit my Rutgers athletics posts over many years is to marvel again at the special brew of shiftless greedy presidents, vile and violent coaches, criminal gang team players, invisible and indifferent fans, etc etc, that has made Rutgers what it is today.

When removing student fees ($138.1M), university support ($146.2M) and state funding ($42.1M) from the revenue total, Rutgers’ deficit since joining the Big Ten surpasses $516 million, marking the biggest in the league by a significant margin.

Most Big Ten schools rely on some form of subsidy, NJ.com analysis shows, but none come close to Rutgers. In the past four years, the New Jersey school took in the most combined state support, direct-university support and student-fee revenue ($109.6M) by a wide margin.

Some American universities are, because of economic/demographic changes, in a state of near-existential crisis. It’s adorably retro to watch Rutgers kill itself for the oldest reason – football/spectacular greed.

Rutgers University, Vision 2020: Be the Walmart of Universities.

************

OTOH: Does this sound like Walmart to you?

**********

UPDATE: Walmarts here we come! A reader reminds me to note that Rutgers has indeed convinced Schiano to take all of the school’s money.

He leaves, he tells us, on a high note; and who could disagree? From his refusal to step down from lucrative do-nothing corporate board seats even though they represented a conflict of interest; to his inept oversight, during his short tenure, of the most prolific, grotesque and high-profile athletic scandals American higher ed has ever seen; to his spending unprecedented amounts of school money on a football team so outrageously horrible that sports writers compete to describe it (“worst team in big ten history,” “so bad the big ten should kick them out,” “worst football imaginable,” “so bad it’s almost impossible“), Barchi has, allow UD to say, managed to embody to perfection the very essence of the postmodern American university president: Brainless, arrogant, greedy, institution-destroying, and deeply, deeply embarrassing for everyone involved. In other words: The bidding for Barchi to be president of your school has just begun!

They’re not just big and bad.

If coaches, they may be the highest paid people in the state.

If players, they’re sports heroes. They get huge scholarships plus under the table payments. Bogus professors and bogus disciplines are invented just for them. All of the best buildings on campus are off limits to everyone but these students, with some interesting results.

The big and bad people – and of course not everyone on your big-time college team is a bad person – may bring a new kind of violence to campus, often working as the team that they are to beat the shit out of male students and sexually assault/film themselves sexually assaulting female.

The president and trustees of places like the University of Nebraska seem to consider what people like Richie Incognito do to their students acceptable collateral damage, and students seem to agree it’s worth it because you need people big and bad enough to beat the shit out of opposing players, and you might not be able to confine to the field or the court the generally violent disposition of big and bad people. Here’s a Rutgers scholar (Rutgers has distinguished itself for coach and player violence) showing his stuff.

I mean, lots of people drink and carouse and get into trouble in college. C’est entendu. But these guys are built like brick shithouses and they work as a team. You do the math.

In the years of running this blog, UD has become familiar with the local booster angle in the local press. As various hideously and cynically mismanaged university sports programs get worse and worse, their provincial scribes visit the latest miracle AD who’s got a miraculous new formula to fix it all. The provincial scribes then report back on their amazing visit with this amazing person. Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an exemplary piece out of one of America’s most scandalous universities, Rutgers.

Here’s its first sentence.

When it comes to bleeding money, Rutgers University has long had one of the worst-performing athletic departments in the country.

The writer means the opposite of what she has written. She means that when it comes to bleeding money Rutgers has long had one of the best-performing athletic departments in the country. Greedy stupid addled Rutgers, with its constantly shifting, constantly scandalous, athletic staff (its last football coach “was fined $50,000 by the university and suspended for three games after contacting [an] instructor about [a player’s] grade. He was later fired [cost of his buyout to the kiddies at Rutgers: $1.4 million] after a losing season that was also marred by the arrest of seven players for violent crimes in and around New Brunswick.”), is possibly the best-performing American athletic department when it comes to bleeding money.

The writer proceeds to take down, unchallenged, every bullshit statement the new miracle guy gives her, inviting us to be excited about what her headline calls his “new plan.” Her big piece of news is that “after years of financial troubles, Rutgers athletics may be poised to get out of the red.”

So what’s the new genius plan?

Try to get supporters to give the program more money.

Sit on our asses until 2021, when Rutgers gets full membership in its conference.

Wow. Why didn’t the last forty ADs think of that.

Due to this amazing new formula, “we will,” promises the new AD, “be in the black.”

***********************

Buried deep in this article is the economist on the faculty who points out that even with the thrilling new payments just around the corner it’s quite likely that anyone telling you the department’s going to be in the black is a fool or a liar (“They haven’t gotten rid of [the deficit] because they don’t want to and don’t need to.”)

************************

And speaking of getting rid of: When, in a year or so, they get rid of this latest miracle worker under pressure from students and alumni and faculty appalled at his real plan (dismantling most components of the university for the sake of the football team), the next Amazing Kreskin will assure this same reporter that victory is just around the corner. And she will faithfully transcribe what he says.

Ain’t it the truth. At America’s football schools, we li’l ol’ instructors don’t count for shit, man. The person who really counts, far as UD can tell, is the assistant coach.

Not the coach. The coach is kinda above it all (‘cept for that dummy Kyle Flood). His job is to take millions in compensation and let the assistant coach(es) do … whatEVer… Coach don’t know. Coach don’t wanna know. They say Rick Pitino’s assistant coach turned the dorm for basketball players into a whorehouse … Rick’s far too classy a guy to know anything about that. They say an assistant coach at UCLA sat on academic support staff to get professors to change athletes’ grades. They say an assistant coach at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette worked out a little conspiracy with a friend of his who supervised ACT tests to toss the lads’ tests and substitute passing ones.

And you know what I bet? I bet Steve Sarkisian’s assistant coaches at the University of Southern California have been working their asses off to help him hide the fact that he’s running a big-time football empire while alcoholic.

I bet his University of Minnesota coaching assistants knew that AD Norbert Teague drank too much and pawed women and all.

Yes, over the years it’s become clear to UD that the fixer, the dirty-work-doer, the facade-maintenance-man in the vast theater of the absurd which is this nation’s effort to meld professional sports with (wait for it) universities is the assistant coach. The assistant coach is the guy who runs after the horse-drawn wagon picking up shit and trying to make it smell like roses.

************
UD thanks John.

Run by mad substitute football coach Norries Wilson [“Wilson … proceeded to go around the [press conference] room calling on individual reporters one at a time like a school teacher. The first person he called on worked for Penn State athletics and was simply at the press conference to record quotes, so he didn’t have a question. Later, [Norries] called on a photographer who was only filming, so she also didn’t have a question…. [A] reporter referred to the Rutgers head coach as ‘Flood.’ Wilson interrupted the question and demanded the reporter call him ‘Coach Flood.'”], Rutgers University now does little more than express for the nation the institution-wide surreality of big-time university sports (“The New Brunswick jail can probably field a terrific football team.”), exactly the way Donald Trump expresses for us the surreality of presidential campaigns.

Rutgers’ putative president wants nothing to do with an athletics program that has anyway, like so many such programs, almost fully spun off from whatever leftovers in New Brunswick people are calling a “university” (see details on the total divorce between universities and their big sports programs here), and the fall of the Rutgers second-in-command (really first, but let’s go with the fiction that presidents run sports factories) COACH Flood, leaves us with the Alexander Haig-like (“I’m in control here.”) figure of third-in-command Norries. All sportsdom this morning talks of his wacko press conference, and there’s no one left at Rutgers to send in the vaudeville hook.

******************

One difference between Trump and Rutgers: Trump is really rich…

Oh but Rutgers is well on its way, given all those big-time football bucks…

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds.

… dumpster fire.

Dumpster Fire

Football’s a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring.
Bound by wild desire
We fell into a dumpster fire.

We fell into a burning dumpster fire,
We went down, down, down as the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The dumpster fire, the dumpster fire.

… a concrete initiative.